2004 10Best Cars Nominees

Other than the above, there are few restrictions for 10Best consideration. The car must be on sale no later than January 2004. Its base price must fall below our price cap of $69,000 (2.5 times the average new-vehicle transaction price as of last summer). And most important of all, the manufacturer must deliver one for our mid-September evaluations, because we aren’t going to dispense any awards to cars we’ve never driven.

Then we gather here in Ann Arbor every editor not on critical assignment elsewhere, including our three international correspondents. This year that produced a quorum of 13, with a total of 292 years spent scribbling about automobiles.

We devoted an entire week to wringing out our nominees on the back roads west of headquarters that have become the real-world evaluation roads of choice for Detroit’s carmakers. There was also plenty of opportunity to see how our favorites performed over the network of local freeways and through the increasingly L.A.-like congestion of downtown Ann Arbor.

With plenty of us on hand, we also had ample opportunity to gauge the people-carrying comfort of each machine. In between our test drives and static examinations, there was time to argue the merits of our favorites and entertain contrasting opinions.

In the end, each of us rated every car on a scale from 1 to 100. We then averaged the scores, and the 10 highest ones bubbled to the top. This year, fully half the list was new. Read on to see which new models clawed their way into our automotive hall of fame.